


Uncurling lifelines

by viverella



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Multi, OT3, Prompt Fill, lots and lots of alternate universes masquerading as one coherent fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-10
Updated: 2015-09-10
Packaged: 2018-04-16 06:31:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4614783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viverella/pseuds/viverella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Somehow, they come together in every life, no matter who they are or where they come from, and somehow, in every life, in every world, they're still working on achieving a happy ending.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Uncurling lifelines

**Author's Note:**

> *comes out of the woodwork after 5 months to finally post new fic* so uh I watched the man from uncle a little while ago (if you follow me on tumblr you _know_ ) and I came out of the theater knowing only that I love these three together more than life itself and as I went out in search of a budding movie!verse fandom I found [this here prompt](http://kinkfromuncle.dreamwidth.org/640.html?thread=45952%0A) at the kink meme. _technically_ the prompt asked for reincarnation, but of course my brain took that and went _that totally means AU right?_ so here I am continuing my grand tradition of breaking into a new fandom by writing AU's and I started out really loving this but now I'm not super sure about it. I have no idea where the beginning or end of this is anymore and this got a lot plottier than intended (at one point it was supposed to be vague and atmospheric - can you imagine?) and also it got a lot longer than intended?? whatever happened to writing a nice 2k fic, Vivian? who knows.
> 
> anyway this is my first time writing ot3 fic and my first time writing these babes (obv) so please be gentle with me if things feel off (but do point shit out to me pls so I can learn just be kind!). I'm still learning how to write them and their delightful relationship!
> 
> title sort of borrowed from Florence + the Machine

In every world, they find each other, and in every world, it’s a little bit different, and in every world, it’s always the same. In every world, it’s different iterations of the same story, of coming together, of her finding them or them finding her. It’s a story about being unmoored and finding that home ends up being in people instead of in place. It’s a story about calm in the face of turmoil. It’s a story about belonging.

\---

In this world, they are spies and unlikely allies and Gaby wakes up every other week in a new city with a new mission and a new identity to get her through customs. In this world, she is a mechanic turned fugitive turned spy, and she’s good with her hands and sharp and angry and loved. In this world, she’s lost her family to a war that was never hers to begin with and left her life behind in East Germany, and she’s dyed her hair three times since starting to work for U.N.C.L.E. Her hair is auburn right now, just redder than her natural hair color, and she’s in Paris and it’s beautiful.

She wakes up in a huge, plush hotel suite (Napoleon’s request) that faces the square below (her request) in a huge bed with a firm mattress (not Illya’s request, per se, but they do it every time anyways, because he never asks for anything but he’s always grumpier the next morning the few times they forget). Gaby can smell breakfast in the next room and hears the shower running in the bathroom as she slips out of bed and lets her feet sink into the ridiculously fluffy carpet. She pads over to the sitting room where Napoleon is doling out fruit and pastries onto little plates on the coffee table and pouring out coffee in anticipation of the other two joining him. He’s humming softly to himself and Gaby thinks that she never sees him more delicate than when he’s handling food. 

Napoleon looks up as she enters and throws herself across a chair. He smiles, the small, secret smile he parts with only when he’s not working to deceive. “Good morning,” he says and offers her a little cup and saucer. “Coffee?”

Gaby flicks her hair over her shoulder. “Thank you,” she says, settling more comfortably into her chair and taking a sip of her coffee (cream, no sugar, just the way she likes it). In the other room, the she hears the shower shut off.

They sit in an easy silence for a few minutes while Gaby drinks her coffee and stares out the window that Napoleon has generously thrown open and Napoleon rearranges the pastries on their plates, humming all the while. Sometimes Gaby thinks about her life and about how she found peace in running from country to country after her life fell apart and she wonders how it’s possible that this is her life, sharing her space and her life with two men who started out as nothing more than the least bad option and have since become her whole world. Sometimes Gaby thinks she’ll wake up and she’ll still be in her shop in East Germany and this will all have been a dream. 

When Illya sits down in the empty armchair by them, he’s dressed and neat and sharp looking already, despite it being still early in the morning, but his hair is still damp and curls a little bit around his ears. He’s cleaning one of his guns as he sits down, hands steady and methodical, and Gaby flicks his wrist gently.

“No guns at breakfast,” she chides, but there’s no bite in it. “You know the rules. You remember what happened in Madrid.”

Illya’s eyes flick up to meet hers and he frowns, but she just smiles serenely and he winces and goes to set his gun down on the nightstand in the bedroom. Gaby nods in approval and leans over to steal a strawberry from Napoleon’s plate. He scowls a little at her but he doesn’t mean it, mostly. 

When Illya comes back, Napoleon offers him the newspaper and flashes a winning smile at Illya’s frown, and Napoleon says, “Tell us what’s on the docket today, Peril.”

Illya heaves a deep sigh at the nickname like he always does, but both of them have responded to all sorts of name calling since the beginning, so Gaby always thinks it’s for show more than anything else. 

“You Americans are getting out of control again,” Illya says breezily as he makes a show of skimming the paper, which makes Napoleon raise an eyebrow and shoot back that _well, you Russians aren’t helping very much either, are you?_ and Gaby feels something warm settle in her stomach.

She picks up her little plate and breaks off a piece of her croissant and pops it in her mouth, standing and moving towards the bedroom to get ready for the day. She sets her plate down on the dresser and licks butter off her fingers as she ventures to the closet to pick out something appropriate to wear for the day. She happens to peek over her shoulder at the other room as she pulls a cream colored dress out of the closet for consideration, and Napoleon and Illya are bickering over breakfast and pulling each other’s pigtails and Illya is complaining that his coffee has gone cold and _why would you pour out my coffee before I was even ready for breakfast, this is just common sense_. And for some reason, Gaby thinks it’s the gentlest thing she’s seen in a very long time. She wonders if it will be like this always, even after the world’s great Cold War is over, or if what they have is more based on the thrill and the running and finding safety and stability in each others’ arms. She wonders if she could maybe find a way to keep just a slice of this forever. 

Gaby feels a rush of something bright and giddy all the way down to her toes and she tosses the dress on the bed and impulsively runs over to where the boys still are. She stands up on her toes to loop her arms around Illya’s shoulders and presses a kiss to his temple before leaning over and doing the same with Napoleon. She lets her fingers linger on Napoleon’s arm and drift down to let his bigger hand clasp hers, and like this, she can just lean her cheek against the crown of Illya’s head. She can feel the steady rise and fall of his chest under her other hand, her arm still looped over his shoulder. Napoleon furrows his eyebrows like he does when he’s trying to crack a safe but his hand is warm and solid against hers. 

Illya peers up at her with eyes that are so soft that Gaby thinks this really might be a dream after all. “What was that for?” he asks, barely audible over the sound of the street below filtering through the open window. 

Gaby laughs. “Can’t a girl just be happy to spend autumn in Paris with her partners?” she asks, and she watches as the lines in Napoleon’s forehead smooth out to something kind and fond. 

“Go get dressed,” Napoleon says. “We have a big day ahead of us.”

Gaby sighs and rocks back onto her heels, letting her arms drop to her sides again. “Are we seeing the sights?” she asks, which is code for _reconnaissance_ and they all know it (understandably, the boys are both always wary of bugs and they always tend to come at things sideways instead of head-on).

“You might want to wear a hat,” Napoleon says, which means he’s warning her about letting her face be seen too much, lest someone catch onto them. “I hear it’s going to be a sunny day today.”

Gaby hums in lieu of answering and turns to head back into the bedroom to shower and dress. Later, as they venture out onto the Paris streets pretending to be tourists, Gaby peeks up at the sky from under the wide brim of her hat and she thinks that like this, with her boys at her sides and the world to infiltrate, perhaps this war isn’t so cold after all.

\---

In this world, Gaby’s family and many of her friends tell her that it’s just a phase, that she’s too young, that she’s just being indecisive and silly. In this world, Gaby’s parents are alive and well and fretting over her and she has to keep reminding them that no, Napoleon and Illya are not just her roommates but her boyfriends, yes both of them, no she hasn’t made a mistake. In this world, the road feels bumpier, because Gaby is in college and the weight of the world and her parents’ expectations are on her and she’s supposed to be figuring her whole life out and there’s no war to distract anyone from the fact. In this world, Gaby is an engineer instead of a mechanic and she’s still just as good with her hands and still dreams about taking on the world some day.

Gaby meets Illya in the third week of class in the first semester of her freshman year, and she meets Napoleon approximately two years later, after about twenty months of dating Illya, six of which were spent wondering _what is this nebulous wanting that both of us are feeling_ , and two of which were spent slowly realizing _what we both really want is another significant other_. They’re content, just the two of them, and they’re easy and comfortable like people get after spending almost two years learning the ins and outs of each other, but they dated a girl a little while ago and it was wonderful and exciting. It didn’t work out, in the end, but Gaby thinks that they might want to try that again because in that, she’d found what she wanted out of her relationships and Illya never said as much because he was never one to say these things outright, but he was always a little softer around the edges those days anyways. 

Gaby meets Napoleon one day when she’s coming home from camping out in her TA’s office all afternoon trying to struggle through a problem set, and she’s exhausted and ready to eat her weight in pasta and then pass out, but when she kicks the door open to her apartment, she’s immediately bombarded with a wall of noise. When she drops all of her stuff unceremoniously in a pile by the door and gets the chance to actually look around, she finds Illya in the living room with some guy she’s never seen before and they’re having what looks like a heated argument over a bunch of paintings they’re looking at. Gaby kicks off her shoes and lets out a long breath. 

“Careful, Illya,” she says sharply, to be heard, but not at all unkindly. She smirks. “The neighbors already complain enough about the noise. We promised we’d be better, remember?”

Illya, who’s standing ramrod straight at his full six-foot-five height like he likes to do when he wants to be extra imposing, falls silent in the middle of his sentence and his eyes flick over to Gaby (and this is the part that Gaby loves, the way that he immediately softens when he sees her, the creases in his forehead and the annoyed twist to his mouth smoothing out into something that, to the trained eye at least, is quiet and fond and warm). The guy Illya’s arguing with turns to look at Gaby as well, his eyebrows raised as he peeks over the back of the couch at her, looking somewhere between impressed that someone managed to steady such a large force and puzzled by how. 

“How was office hours?” Illya asks, argument all but forgotten for the moment, and he’s so soft with her sometimes she can’t believe he’s real.

Gaby shrugs. “Exhausting,” she says, and she can almost feel her brain buzzing between her ears. She makes her way over to him, touching a hand to his arm and standing up on her toes to press a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “Have you eaten yet? I’m starving.”

The hard edge returns to the set of his jaw like he’s just remembered that he was annoyed a moment ago, and he says, “Not yet. We have been… working.”

Gaby glances over at the pile of books that’s taken over their coffee table and thinks about the shouting she walked in on and says, “Doesn’t seem like working to me.”

The guy who’s been lounging on the couch like he belongs here catches Gaby’s eye and smiles a sort of lazy, pretty smile, maybe like he’s a little less sweet than he pretends to be. “It’s a project for an art history class. We’re working together,” he says, and then he extends his hand to her and introduces himself, “I’m Napoleon.”

Gaby laughs, because of course a preposterously pretty guy like him would have an equally preposterous name, and she says, “No way that’s your real name.”

And he smiles and says, “No really, it is” and that turns into him whipping out his driver’s license to prove it to her and she’s laughing and he’s grinning and Illya, beside her, shifts his weight and tries not to look amused. Somehow, Napoleon talks them into letting him make them dinner (“I insist – I took over your apartment all afternoon and probably made your neighbors hate you, it’s my fault really” and all sorts of charming things that Illya just rolls his eyes at and mutters about under his breath, _well if you actually knew anything about art, we would already be done with this project and no one would have to hate us_ and Gaby just laughs and laughs and laughs). He manages to throw together some pasta dish that’s the best thing Gaby’s had all week, even though she and Illya keep only a very sparse assortment of food around the apartment, and she pours out some wine for them and eats and drinks and happily listens to Illya bicker with Napoleon about this art history project they have to work on. 

By the time Gaby sends Napoleon off, it’s late and Gaby is full and happy and warm, and as she waves goodbye to him, Illya rests his chin down on the top of her head and drapes his arms over her shoulders like he’s considering throwing his whole weight on her. He won’t, most likely, but he’s a little like a cat in this way sometimes. 

Gaby lets the door swing shut and leans back against Illya’s chest, smiling. “I like him,” she says. 

Behind her, Illya scoffs. “Not a chance,” he says, but there’s no bite to it, and when Gaby turns to press a kiss to his mouth, she sees that his eyes are bright and excited like they used to get for her in the early days of the two of them, and this, she thinks, is her favorite tell when he’s interested in someone. 

Gaby smirks, a challenge. “We’ll see about that,” she says. 

And she’s right, in the end, because several weeks later, they’re all going out on dates and doing movie nights, and Napoleon cooks and he and Illya still bicker even though their project is long since completed and they both complain when Gaby steals all the blankets at night, and Gaby thinks that she’s never felt more whole. 

\---

In this world, they meet as children, and Gaby’s house is the safe space they all run to, because her mama and papa love her to the moon and back, because her mama and papa buy her toy cars and Lego sets and make soup for dinner three times a week. In this world, Gaby meets the boys chasing a butterfly down the street under the watchful eye of her mama and papa and she meets the boys because they saw the butterfly too. In this world, Gaby begs her parents to let Illya and Napoleon stay for dinner and sometimes even sleep over because then she’ll know for certain that her boys are warm and safe and happy, because when they’re around she is always warm and safe and happy. 

Gaby leans her head on her papa’s knee one day when the boys nap in the next room, curled around each other under a carefully quilted blanket that her mama drew up over them, and Gaby looks up at her papa with big eyes that haven’t yet known hardship (but might, some day). Her mama is in the kitchen, humming and making dinner, and her papa is doing a crossword puzzle. He promised to make pie for dessert tonight as a special treat like he knows that Illya ran over to Gaby’s house in tears earlier today and it took what felt like hours (but was probably only about ten minutes) of soothing from both Gaby and Napoleon to get Illya to calm down, and the house is warm and filled with golden, late-afternoon light. 

Gaby runs to her papa in the late afternoon and leans her head on his knee and asks him, “Papa, what is it like to love?”

And her papa smiles at her and says, “It’s like when you’re happy to be around someone and you always want them to be happy too.”

Gaby hums and fiddles with a little toy car she has in her hands. When she grows up, she thinks, she wants to be one of the people who design cars. 

“Can you love more than one person at the same time?” she asks, and she’ll realize, years down the line, that she always meant this more than she ever realized. She stares up at her papa like the weight of the world rests on his answer. 

Her papa sets his crossword puzzle aside and he crouches down to her level and he says, all seriousness because his little girl has always been serious and she’s always meant what she’s said, “Of course you can. Love comes in many shapes and sizes.”

Gaby grins, feeling light and giddy, and she springs up on her toes to press a kiss to her papa’s cheek before running back off to the living room where the boys are napping. She crawls under the blanket to join them, making room for herself in the warm space between them, and Napoleon makes soft, sleepy noises as he shifts to accommodate her, and Illya presses his face into her shoulder. 

In the next room, her mama goes over to where her papa is doing his crossword to tell him that the soup’s simmering and he can start on pie if he wants to, and they smile at each other like something bright and safe. Everything Gaby knows about love she learned from her papa and mama and she knows that they love each other like they love her, to the moon and back. She knows they love each other in the early mornings before last night’s snores have faded from their breath and they love each other late at night when darkness tries to creep in on them and they love each other always and forever. 

Gaby watches her mama’s gentle hand on her papa’s steady shoulder and she thinks that this is how she wants to be loved, that this is how she could be loved. She’s young still, barely older than eight, but she’s old enough to know that she never feels more at ease than when she’s with Napoleon and Illya and she thinks that this is how she wants to be when she grows up.

\---

In at least one world, somewhere, sometime, it’s the end of the world, and in this world they find each other still. In this world, Gaby isn’t sure what day or year it is anymore because her watch broke a few months after the world fell apart and she’s lost track of the days and nights that have passed since then. In this world, all that Gaby knows is that the world is slowly freezing to death and every day her future looks a little bleaker and she might not have even made it this far if she hadn’t stumbled upon Napoleon and Illya’s camp some weeks ago (or has it been months?) in the snow, tired and hungry. In this world, finding them is safety in numbers and a warm (or warmer, at the very least) place to sleep and finding peace in knowing that she’s not the only one left in the world. 

She hasn’t seen anyone else since she found them, but just knowing they’ll be there when she opens her eyes is enough to keep her grounded and feeling like a real person, because there had been days when she’d been on her own that she wasn’t entirely sure that anything she felt actually existed at all. There’s something oppressive in the grey cold that’s slowly settling over Earth like all the color, too, knows that there’s no future left here. 

Sometimes, Illya notices she’s shaking when she’s trying not to let it be known, and he drapes their one warm blanket over her shoulders and says softly, “You’re trembling,” because they say everything these days, even the smallest things, even the most banal thoughts, because in the saying of it all, they can remind themselves that they still exist. 

Gaby tugs the blanket over her shoulder and frowns, saying, “It’s cold,” because it’s easier to admit to that than vocalize the visceral fear she keeps trapped within her chest, the fear of loss, the fear of non-existence, the fear that none of this means a single thing to the world. 

Napoleon comes over to her from where he’s been poking at what passes for their campfire these days and hands her a bowl of something warm. “You’ll feel better,” he says, and it almost sounds like he’s trying to reassure himself too. 

Gaby takes a sip, mostly because she knows that Napoleon will quietly fret over her if she doesn’t eat what he cooks, and it’s some kind of thin stew and it’s bland and tasteless in her mouth like almost everything else, but she smiles at him anyways, because it’s the best any of them can do. The ridge of his brow is still furrowed, and she thinks that maybe he’s starting to learn how to read her a little better (and this is when knowing the time would help – how long has it been since she met the two of them? How long does it take for a person to get to know her?). She steps up onto her toes to press a kiss to his mouth, quick and light, but meant to settle, to steady. 

“Thank you,” she says and means it so much it scares her a little. 

She doesn’t look away until his expression levels out to something softer and he quirks what could be considered a smile at her. She feels the weight of Illya’s hand on the small of her back and she leans into his touch and takes another sip of her stew. She catches Illya and Napoleon exchanging worried looks over her head like they think she can’t see them, and sometimes, sometimes, she thinks that the fear has gotten to all of them but none of them will ever say it, because the moment they say it, it becomes real, and for now, the only real thing that Gaby thinks any of them want to imagine is each other. 

\---

In this world and in _this_ world and in every world, they meet at different times and in different places, and they’re all different people and they’re the same. In every world, Gaby is untrained energy, all passion and fire without outlet, and in every world, she finds peace in two men who have no reason to be so grounding, because they are, all of them, wild and untamed. In every world, Gaby finds a place to feel safe. In every world, Gaby is loved. In every world, it is improbable, but in every world, they find each other anyways. 

Maybe, if she could look at it all, at every iteration of every her and every them, she would find that the story, in the end, is about the three of them finding ways to make the universe kind when it has done wrong, about finding the warmth and kindness in people not made to be kind, about finding the softness left after the world makes them rough. It’s about coming home.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! comments and kudos are always super appreciated!
> 
> and feel free to come find me on [tumblr](http://nataliaromonoff.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
